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SHOW 110 TRANSCRIPT
Whatever Happened to Ethics and Civility?

CAN you remain ethical when a devious rival is promoted ahead of you? Can you stay civil when a cursing driver cuts you off the road? Modern life means constant competition. We struggle at school for grades and admissions, battle at work for markets and money, and everywhere strive for status and recognition. In this pressure-cooker environment, obsessed by out-of-reach goals and hemmed in by potential adversaries, how can we expect high moral values, let alone courteous behavior, to survive? The decline in ethics and civility in the contemporary urban world has become more and more precipitate. We are all impoverished by the deterioration of morals and the erosion of respect. But can we fairly place the blame only on the frantic pace and ferocity of our day-to-day existence? What can each of us do to make ourselves and our common polity a little more civil, a little more ethical? We assembled some ethically minded experts who promised to be civil.

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PARTICIPANTS

Bruce Chapman, a former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Organizations in Vienna, is president of the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank whose mission is to make a positive vision of the future practical. Bruce believes that civil debate is the best way to solve social problems.

Barbara Marx Hubbard is a founder of the World Future Society and co-founder of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution, in Santa Barbara. She is also the author of many books, including The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium. She takes a global perspective and views the human community as a whole.

Saru Jayaraman, a Yale law student, is the national founder of WYSE, an inner-city youth organization praised by President Clinton as "America at its best." Saru talks about the despair and anger of young inner-city girls and how that leads to what is often perceived as asocial behavior, and she explains the importance of teaching them critical thinking.

Dr. John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Berkeley, specializes in Creole languages, the social dynamics of language, and has written extensively on the use of black English. John discusses the effects of language on social relationships and behaviors.

Dr. Richard Mouw is the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, in Pasadena, California, where he is a professor of Christian philosophy and ethics. He is the author of ten books, including Uncommon Decency: Christian Civility in an Uncivil World. Richard defines ethics and civility in an elegant and broadly Christian context.

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ROBERT: Richard, what's the difference between ethics and civility, and why are they important today?

RICHARD: Ethics concerns issues of right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice. And civility is subsumed within that. The word "civility" comes from the Latin civitas, for city. To be civil is to know how to get along in the city--how to treat people who are different from you, who have different beliefs or ethnic background. Civility, then, is public politeness, toleration, all the kinds of things that are important to maintain good citizenship and facilitate interactions in the public square.

ROBERT: Barbara, I want you to forget for a moment your role as a global visionary. As a mother of five and grandmother of five, what do you teach your grandchildren about ethics and civility?

BARBARA: I think you teach mostly by example, so what I'm trying to give my grandchildren is an example of somebody who's doing her best to be ethical. And since one of my definitions of futurism is "expanded parenthood"--looking ahead for the whole human community--the same principle applies. 

ROBERT: Is that practical in a modern, cutthroat economy? 

BARBARA: It's the greatest practicality there is, because otherwise you're less than you can be. Real joy, real meaning, comes from that sense of connectedness with one another, however difficult [it may be to maintain]. 

ROBERT: Bruce, you've had a long career in government service, including serving as director of the Office of Planning and Evaluation in the Reagan White House. Why do you think civil discourse is so important in creating a positive future?

BRUCE: People really do have disputes--we see things differently, and we need to adjudicate those disputes. Paradoxically, the tendency to try to cover up our disputes and make everybody agree is what causes conflict in the long run. So honest debate conducted in a civil manner turns out to be the best social system.

ROBERT: Even if the two sides disagree violently?

BRUCE: It's still the way to get at the truth. And in the long run--paradoxically, as I say--it makes people happier with one another. 

ROBERT: We'll see if it makes people happier here. John, as a linguist, how do you see language as a dynamic element of social change?

JOHN: There are many answers to that question, but one is that language labels things, and labels have a way of changing people's conceptions. Take the slogan "Save the Whales," which is probably a fixture by now in most of our minds. The fact of the matter is that only certain groups of whales have ever actually been endangered, but the phrase has been useful in communicating an ecological perspective. To have said, "Save Certain Stocks of Whales" wouldn't have worked as well. So language has a way of bringing society into awareness. 

ROBERT: What are the implications for civility?

JOHN: Language often operates on two levels. They're called, for better or worse, the high and the low. And most people in the world speak one of the two varieties, neither one superior to the other in God's or anyone else's eyes. But generally, in the ideal society, everybody would be able to meet in the middle, all on some generally accepted standard level, while preserving their own nonstandard, but not substandard, kind of speech. And those who can manipulate both the high level and the low level are best equipped to be civil in the broadest sense of the term. 

ROBERT: Saru, what kinds of inequalities do young people face today, and how has this contributed to fraying the social fabric of America?

SARU: Young people are increasingly angry, realizing that they've been left out of this high-level discourse you're talking about. For example, many of our young women have been told by their teachers that they will never go to college, that they'll end up working at McDonald's. They're twelve to fourteen years old and they live in the inner cities of Los Angeles, say, or New Haven. So if they'll never be part of that race for status, they end up resorting to another race for another form of status. Many young women become pregnant, because they feel valued having a baby. They've told us that having a baby gives them status in school. It's very difficult for young people to maintain any form of civility when they're interacting with mainstream institutions, because they're very angry at being completely shut out. 

ROBERT: You teach these young women critical thinking, thereby improving their self-image?

SARU: Absolutely. The media pressures young women in many potent ways--telling them how to look, how to think, how to act. There are always societal messages and images coming at them, telling them that they don't belong, that they don't look the way they should--and so their self-esteem is greatly diminished. We provide these young women with critical thinking in order to break down those messages and deconstruct those images, allowing them to take power for themselves. The result is a gain in self-esteem, enhanced interpersonal relationships, improved ethical behavior--all preparing them to take leadership in the world.

ROBERT: It's nice to be talking about civility when everyone's so agreeable. But what happens when there's severe controversy? Richard, what about the intense, sometimes brutal confrontation between the pro-choice and pro-life movements? How do you maintain civility in such a bloody conflict? 
RICHARD: It's not easy--that needs to be said at the outset. The religious scholar Martin Marty, of the University of Chicago, puts it well. He points out that often people who are civil don't have strong convictions and people who have strong convictions aren't civil. The real challenge is to have convicted civility. We must to learn how to engage in that high-level discourse, to treat other people as having value even when we seriously disagree with them. That's the challenge.

ROBERT: How do you do that?

RICHARD: As a Christian, it's important for me to cultivate self-criticism and humility in conducting a dialogue with other people--and I'm very conservative on many of these issues. It's awful when my kind of people enter into those debates in a self-righteous and judgmental manner. We need to state our convictions honestly and listen to each other genuinely.

ROBERT: Bruce, you've had experience in civil debate.

BRUCE: [The way that the abortion question is usually dealt with] is a perfect example of what not to do. When you make it difficult to have civil debate, to have real discussion, on highly charged issues, you marginalize people, you push them out of the civil discourse arena and into the uncivil streets. They take it to the abortion clinic. People say, "I don't want to hear about that, I don't want to talk about that." Well, hearing and talking are a lot better than negative action. And so you come back to the proper role of politics, which is to teach young people how to take part in public discourse. We should reinstitute what we used to call civics--political education--to instruct people how to participate in civil society.

ROBERT: John, you've also been engaged in controversial issues, particularly black English in education. How do you engender civility in emotionally charged situations?

JOHN: Well, for one thing, it would help if more people accepted the fact that there are certain issues--abortion being one of them--where unfortunately there will always be fundamental disagreement over fundamental principles. A comfort with agreeing to disagree is something often sadly missing. We need to put ourselves in each other's heads, as I like to put it. For example, in the black English debate, it's often difficult for black advocates of using black English in schools to realize that a white person who questions the wisdom of this is not necessarily a racist. On the other hand, it's often difficult for white commentators to imagine that a black person who advocates black English in schools isn't some kind of woolly-headed anticonstructive militant. So, trying to understand where others are coming from is important, though difficult.

ROBERT: Sounds like you've been criticized by both sides?

JOHN: Yes, I've been there, taken it from both sides.

ROBERT: Some would call that a compliment.

JOHN: I suppose, but the most important thing I've learned is that despite what happens, you have to try and rise above it. You can feel the burning in the pit of your stomach, but then you ought to be thinking, "How am I going to look at this tomorrow?".

ROBERT: Barbara, as someone who always sees high levels, tell us about conscious evolution and its implications for civility.

BARBARA: The human species now has so much power that if we don't become civil with one another we can destroy our whole life-support system. The danger of incivility has escalated. And the need to survive is driving us toward a global consciousness. We have to recognize the interdependence of the environment. For example, if there's a nuclear accident, it affects everybody. So it seems to me that the interconnections and complexification of the world are making ethics pragmatically necessary for survival, whereas in the past it might have been desirable but not essential. 

ROBERT: You speak about ethical evolution.

BARBARA: My primary phrase is "conscious evolution"--becoming aware of our impact on nature. We understand the gene; we understand the brain; we can start making new life-forms. This means human consciousness is entering nature. And so ethical evolution will become the key to the future. 
ROBERT: Bruce, let's talk politics. How has political reform affected general morality?

BRUCE: In a perverse way. Reform has backfired in my opinion. I used to be a big reformer. I believed that if we passed enough laws governing how people should behave, they would behave better. I've changed my mind. For one thing, I went back and read some of my college Aristotle and realized that virtue, in order to be virtue, has to be voluntary. It has to be something volitional on your part. If you're forced to be virtuous, especially in every little detail, you'll rebel against it. It's like paying your taxes; you have to do it, so paying your taxes isn't virtuous. Virtue entails choice. So as we take choices out of politics--as we put politicians under more and more strictures--then people of real virtue don't want to be involved. They stay away from politics. And what happens is just the opposite of what groups such as Common Cause and the like predicted. Instead of restoring trust in government, we've done the opposite--we've destroyed trust in government. The more laws we pass, the more investigations we've had.

ROBERT: Examples?

BRUCE: We have all these laws about what you may or may not do with gratuities. Someone whom we trust to declare war we don't trust to accept a lunch? This is ridiculous. And since no one wants to live a ridiculous life, good people--especially young people--stay away from politics. The founders of this country understood that the nature of man is fallen. So you set up a system where interests compete in a civilized fashion. Sure, you'll get some wrong decisions, but by and large it'll work, because people will be part of it.

SARU: "The nature of man"--that's part of the problem. There's no inclusion of women or other groups. People feel totally alienated from the political process, because it continues to be the same group, in their view, that rules in Washington and elsewhere. It's white men, typically, in office.

ROBERT: What's a solution?

SARU: Providing young women with the ability to feel like leaders themselves. We encourage young women to take action in their community, then to go on and get politically involved and become leaders. It doesn't happen by giving them a civics course--it happens by allowing them to question authority, by giving them the tools to take leadership.

ROBERT: If women had a larger role in leadership, would that make a difference?

SARU: It would depend. If they were the kind of women who encouraged other women to take leadership--then, yes. But if they were the kind who felt "Well, I've made it on my own, and everybody else should, too"--then, no. Young women need to feel that they're a part of the discourse, otherwise there's no point in talking about civility; because if the only way you can be virtuous is by having options, then there's no way that these young people can be truly virtuous, since right now the only options they have are forced. 

ROBERT: John, are young university students frustrated because of the system?

JOHN: Yes, they are. This may be an unpopular thing to say, but I think that if one is an adolescent, any kind of adolescent, then it's natural to have a certain frustration with the system. There's a natural insecurity that adolescents presumably have had since the year one, and they need outlets to cope. Thirty years ago, some very good things happened on college campuses--events that made my own life possible. But now I think there's a kind of copycat reflex: on many campuses, every spring, there has to be an issue that you chain yourself to something about. And frankly, as sympathetic as I am to these students, often the issues nowadays are getting so small that I sense more hormones and life force than intellectual substance--

ROBERT: What's wrong with hormones and life force?

JOHN: I'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with it--

SARU: There's nothing wrong with it. It's wonderful that young people are taking leadership and taking action. Let me tell you that the vast majority of people are in no way politically active or conscious and feel unable to act or voice their opinion--they're totally separate from public discourse.

RICHARD: But I wonder how much of that separation is grounded in deeper issues. The food-service people on campuses tell us that students don't dine, they graze--the dining hall is set up as a series of grazing stations. And that's an extension, really, of family life. The family meal is a wonderful workshop in civility, where we learn to hang in there with people with whom we're irritated and don't agree. And unless we have those earlier workshops in civility, I'm not sure that simply giving voice to people who haven't learned the basics of human interaction is going to do a lot of good.

JOHN: See, that's the problem with some of what's happening on campus. I agree that young people shouldn't just be led, that they need an active involvement in what's going on. But unfortunately, what often accompanies this is a lack of what we're calling civility--an inability to even make the pretense of listening to any other opinion. That, I think, is not healthy.

SARU: But can you please tell me how older people have provided proper role models? Young people don't feel that they've been listened to, either. And if their role models are spouting and not listening, how will they learn to listen and not spout?

BRUCE: It's interesting to see a kind of revolution on a generational basis against the baby boomers--the generation that was raised with the family meals and yet had the high divorce rates. We're seeing better behavior, sociologically, in the younger generation--particularly the millennials, the really young kids who will come to maturity in the new millennium, because they have rebelled against the older generation and are moving toward more normative behaviors. This revolution is also taking place spiritually, with millions of college students transforming their campuses through groups like Inter-Varsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade. About fifteen years ago, the social scientist James Q. Wilson said that if we're going to change the culture, we have to start from the ground up. Well, to my amazement, this great transformation is happening with many young people. They're not going to have the number of abortions, they're going to have more stable families, and they're going to be more civil, because they are also going to be more ethical.

ROBERT: Saru, can you have civility without economic equality?

SARU: No, I don't think so, because young people know who the haves and the have-nots are. And as long as they don't feel part of the haves, it's very difficult for them to engage in what polite society would call ethical behavior--

ROBERT: Is that an excuse to be unethical?

SARU: I wouldn't necessarily call the kinds of behaviors that young people engage in unethical, but I think mainstream society would. And as long as there is that judgment, young people cannot feel included or positive about themselves. They lack self-esteem, which leads to an inability to take leadership. 

BRUCE: Unless there is not just opportunity but some stakeholder's share in the economy, we'll have this increasing disparity between the haves and the have-nots. And it ends up in some sort of civil conflict. One of the reasons I'm a strong supporter of privatizing at least some of Social Security is that people who change jobs often, who have what most people consider menial jobs, will nonetheless get a share, a stake, in the economy and its future. Otherwise we're going to have people who are expected to become highly skilled and high tech, and if they don't make it they're just going to be left out.

JOHN: I agree with Saru that there are people who don't feel included in society, and that sense leads to unethical behavior. It's not just young people but a great many people; for example, many Latino communities and much of the African American community. Mainstream culture is seen by them as something outside their ken, and therefore, quite naturally, something hostile and not to be emulated. And there's a great deal of unethical behavior. We could argue that it's not unethical if it's provoked by economic disparity, but that's not the point; that kind of behavior is going to keep happening, unless we work harder to bring rich and poor together, to bridge this disparity. 

BARBARA: I think we have to be inventive about the very economic system that's causing inequality. For example, devise situations where you don't depend only on a job for your income. If people have skills, they can barter, so everybody has work, everybody gets to do something. 

ROBERT: What about global capitalism?

BRUCE: The economist Richard Rahn, one of our senior fellows at the Discovery Institute, has written a book called The End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy, in which he predicts that people will be able to move money around so fast that governments won't be able to keep track of it, and therefore the whole taxation system will come under question. What constitutes ethical behavior in the exchange of money and the paying of taxes may change radically in the next century.

RICHARD: I want to raise a question about Saru [Jayaraman]'s strong emphasis on the need to give youth a voice that they don't have. Most popular culture I see is very youth-oriented. The new TV shows focus on youth--turn on MTV and you see very angry expressions of a youth culture and what many of us in the mainstream culture would consider to be alternative lifestyles being displayed as perfectly acceptable and normal.

SARU: OK, but what kind of political power does that give young people--or what kind of economic power, for that matter? None. It provides them perhaps with some forms of expression, many of which, such as the violence you see depicted in the media, are self-destructive. But it provides them with no positive alternatives or no positives tools to really take leadership or feel included. 

RICHARD: But when the whole market is geared toward youth culture, where are the issues?

SARU: You may see the market as reflecting what young people want. I see young people reflecting what the market is trying to sell them, which is violence, which is sexism, racism, body image. 

RICHARD: The market didn't create baggy clothes. The market commodified baggy clothes. 

JOHN: I will make the extreme statement that if you watch a lot of TV, and if you really follow the movies--not just the big hits--you will see just about every conceivable kind of young person in this society covered. Nice white people, bad white people, inner-city thugs, inner-city people getting along, middle-class black young people. You really see the whole thing. I think it's easy to forget how important youth are to our popular culture, because, Saru, you and I have grown up in a world where popular culture has been synonymous with youth. In the mid-1950s, you could turn on the TV and see Mary Martin and Noel Coward, both quite middle-aged, doing a TV special, singing songs that would be most uncool today.

SARU: But I'd like to know how that translates into any form of political or economic power. It's easy for us sitting here to say, "Oh, our culture reflects youth." But in what way are youth being included in the benefits of society?

ROBERT: What's the solution? What do you want to see happening?

SARU: I want young people to be able to deconstruct what they see in media and take action in their real lives, not in their media lives. 

BRUCE: My wife is a high school counselor, and she deals with young people in the inner city every day. She sees the abortions, the murders, the problems of abuse, and so forth. She also sees that these people are not represented by the protest culture. What you see in the media is largely a commodified protest culture. The real revolution among young people is spiritual, religious. You never see that represented in the media, and you hardly ever hear people discussing it.

ROBERT: Well, one thing I see represented here are two women from different generations who have taken charge of their own lives and have become significant leaders themselves. Barbara [Marx Hubbard], you've pioneered a new way of thinking about the globe. Saru [Jayaraman], you've created an activist organization that gives young girls real opportunities. What have you as women brought to this new culture? 

BARBARA: I cover the gap: I was born in 1929, I got married in 1951, I had five children--and I was a member of the so-called most boring generation. I went to Bryn Mawr, I had a good education, but I immediately got pregnant; Margaret Mead called it "mindless fecundity." I love my children deeply, but the fact is that in the 1950s there was no sense of identity as a woman beyond being a wife and mother. I got depressed, but then I read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. She noticed that many women suffered from "the problem with no name"--they wanted to be themselves as well as wives and mothers. I read the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who said that all self-actualizing people--productive and creative people--have vocations. And I realized that what was happening for me as a woman was that although I loved my children, my vocation was not motherhood. My vocation was out in the world. And as I began to find my vocation, I became a better mother. Now I'm in my second motherhood, because I'm back with my children and my grandchildren, but as somebody who has found her vocation.

ROBERT: Your vocation as a global visionary--

BARBARA: As a communicator. To see a positive future. As women have fewer children and live longer lives--like myself, I'm almost seventy and I still feel I'm at the beginning--there's an arousal. I call it the vocational arousal. We're being awakened from within. 

ROBERT: Saru, you, too, have had this vocational arousal. How have you had the power to create a whole new institution? 

SARU: Only from anger, really.
ROBERT: We'd be a great society if everybody were as productively angry as you are. 

SARU: Well, growing up, even in junior high school, I realized how much inequality there was--particularly for girls--and how much pressure to conform. Our whole effort is to let young women know that they can be whoever they want to be--that they can take whatever role they want to take. 

ROBERT: But you made your own opportunity. 

SARU: I want to provide more young women with more opportunities. 

BARBARA: That's leadership. Leadership means empowering others to become leaders. We have to face it, some people are pioneering souls--that's what I call them. Some people are drawn to the growing edge of things. It's beautiful that the image of women now is more open and far, far richer than it ever was when I was growing up. 

SARU: I hope so.

ROBERT: A prediction, please. In a hundred years, will new technologies make the world more or less ethical and civil?

BRUCE: More, but also posing great dangers. It all comes back to our understanding of human nature--who and what human beings are. 

RICHARD: Technology has the potential for creating new modes of community, but at the same time we're seeing a reaction against modernization, in the form of new tribalism and warfare. 

SARU: I hope we'll be more ethical and civil. If we can provide young people with positive role models and sufficient change to feel included, yes. 

BARBARA: If the evolutionary trend of greater complexity leading to greater consciousness and greater freedom continues--and it's a fifteen-billion-year trend--more and more people are going to experience themselves as part of the whole. 

JOHN: Frankly, to the extent that the communications revolution supports global capitalism, we will see an increasing disparity between rich and poor, which means that civility will continue to be eroded, because economic disparity creates inevitable tension.


ROBERT: CONCLUDING COMMENT

ETHICS and civility don't come easily in a socially diverse, competitively charged society. They take work. Even experts disagree about what can be done. For some professions--doctors, lawyers, the police--there are required rules of conduct, though we know they're frequently broken. For some communities, there are particular patterns of ethics that are absolutely wrong, such as experimental fraud in the scientific community and plagiarism among writers. But some rules are changing. Take E-mail; there's a new informality, brevity, rapidity--and less concern about spelling. I get E-mails from scholars making grade-school mistakes, and I no doubt zap back clunkers myself. Certainly there should be minimum standards for everyone. For example, people shouldn't shout at each other, except to prevent accidents. So, let's impose--don't laugh--a legal limitation on shouting, like the limitations on pollution. Hereafter you are allowed only two shouts per month. If you need more, we'll establish a Shouter's Market, where you can purchase the rights for additional shouting. Sure, it sounds like farce--but maybe it's closer to truth.

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